Letters from an insomniac
Preface: This is a fictional, creative story.
I used to be a productive insomniac.
Make music throughout the night. Write poems. Complete college essays before the morning. Paint paintings. Be a socialite; network at night. Solve mental problems.
Now, I just lay in bed in a state of psychosis. Clawing at the cage of my skin, pleading with the pink, spongy computer plugged inside my skull to shut off. Take a break.
Please! I cry into the dark. My body is aching. I feel hot burning and needles under my flesh. My body needs rest too, not just the brain.
Three annoying pop songs playing on repeat, bizarre realistic scenarios playing out, bizarre unrealistic scenarios playing out, counting to 100 in French and then backwards, trying to have a debate in Spanish in front of 1000 people, negotiate the freedom of my loved ones being held hostage, playing an embarrassing memory from 18 years ago, filming a tour with Architectural Digest in my fancy house in Paris with my equally famous husband, making a grocery list for tomorrow— scratch that—make a grocery list if I had an unlimited budget… no scratch that too just make a list of the 5 essentials to survive on, trying to imagine what Da Vinci did in his years of absence, and so on so forth.
The overworked system has gone mad. It creates lies for why it cannot rest too.
you won’t wake up if you fall asleep
your limbs will fall off if you fall asleep
someone will break in and kill you in your sleep
reasons unknown
I can be in a state of trance where I feel myself on the edge of falling asleep. I am hanging over the railing. My fingertip is grazing the surface of the water. My body is struggling to fall into the sea of dreams but there are demons, much stronger than my will to sleep holding me back.
I have sleep paralysis almost every dawn because my body is so tired it becomes paralyzed. But the brain is fully there—aware. It’s become a regular routine of facing the black shapless man that crawls out from my bathroom or closet and stands over me, terrorizing me. I don’t fear him as much as much as he annoys me. He doesn’t take pleasure in physically tormenting me in my catatonic state as much as he like the emotional and physiological torment. I think he’s bored of seeing me threaten to kill him and fight him soon as I’ve gained my autonomy back to fight. But he’s always gone once I regain myself.
I shudder. I burst up from my bed seeing it is 4 am and take whatever is in the cabinet to make me drowsy. I have to drug myself and sit in a hot shower every single night to get a few hours of sleep. This cannot be good for me.
It’s been months. Months of this.
